Disclaimers:
1.) This is for homework, but I’m laying everything out and just asking how to find (or at least search for) the info… not the answer.
2.) This is in GQ and not GD because I’m looking for facts, not a debate about Capitalism
The assignment is to identify one country in our group’s continent [I’m not naming the continent in the interest of staying in the spirit of the “no-homework” rule] that has Communist economic system, one with Capitalist, and one with Socialist; and then compare their economic standing.
I have Goode’s World Atlas and CIA Factbook at hand, so finding the Communist country won’t be hard, and I have all the financial data that I need.
However, there’s no place that says whether a country is “socialist” or “capitalist”. It seems to me that this is not a label (in the objective sense), but a continuum along a scale. (For example, is England Socialist or Capitalist? Compared to the US, any country with UHC would be relatively Socialist, but I’m trying to be objective.) I’m thinking that the only way to objectively compare where different countries fall on that scale is to compare what percentage of their industry is owned by the government and what percentage is owned by private industry.
Does anybody know how to find and compare this information? I’m not seeing anything on CIA Factbook that shows this. Or, does anybody have a better idea on a way to determine where countries fall on the Capitalist vs. Socialist scale?
Actually, you will not find any countries with a communist economic system. There are a few (China, Cuba, Vietnam, spring to mind) with governments that claim that they aspire to create a communist economic system, but I do not believe that any (unless, perhaps, lunatic regimes like Cambodia under Pol Pot, or modern North Korea) have ever claimed to have got there. Certainly the Soviet Union never did. (I remember Breznev once claiming that, although it still had had a long way to go to true communism, the Soviet Union under his rule had achieved full socialism. However, even that was undoubtedly more propagandistic boasting than reality.)
As for socialist versus capitalist, as you say, it is a matter of degree. In practice, all actual advanced economies (including the United States, and those of nominally “communist” countries) are “mixed” with elements of both socialism and capitalism. Because there are so many variables, and so many areas of an economy that that can be more socialistic or capitalistic in one way or another, I doubt that it is possible to get more than a very rough, qualitative sense of who is more socialistic than who, but at the extremes it is fair to say that Sweden (for instance), or Cuba is more socialist than the United States (and, very possibly, more socialist, economically than nominally communist China).
Of course, Sweden is a very wealthy country and Cuba is poor. Likewise, although the United States is rich, I very much suspect that you would find that many of the world’s poorest countries are at least equally as capitalistic (in as much as they have coherent economic systems at all). Go figure!
You have my sympathies. You seem to have been given a crappy, incoherent assignment.
Missed edit window:
In fact, I suspect that what your instructor really expects you to do is to to chose countries not by their actual economic system, but according to whether their governments present themselves as favoring communism, socialism (which, in practice, usually means favoring a mixed economy with a relatively high proportion of socialistic elements), or capitalism.
Even this is problematic, though, as most democracies alternate between having having “conservative” governments, who show comparatively more favor to the capitalist elements of their mixed economy, and “left” or “liberal” ones who prefer to talk up the more socialistic elements.
I would guess (depending on what sort of class this is for) that the whole point of this exercise is to show how difficult it is to really define some of these terms and to put economies into neat categories. Given the egregious ways some of these terms have been thrown around in political discourse as of late, maybe the idea is to dispel preconceived notions.
The class is Social Studies for the Elementary Learner. The instructor, who I will refer to as Dr. C, is as well traveled as she is educated. However, at the last minute she scrapped her original homework plans and replaced them with this idea. This is an “unapologetically Christian” school, and she seems to be as fiscally conservative as she is socially conservative. I suspect that the assignment was to demonstrate how much better Capitalistic countries perform than Socialistic or Communistic. It is possible that some of my comments during the class prompted this change.
For example, she told an anecdote about staying in a building in Russia. There was a giant pothole that nobody bothered to fix, because everybody was used to the government fixing stuff like that for them. Everybody just drove around it. I suggested that, while fixing the pothole would be impossible for any one person, if everybody in the building got together (in what would be a miniature version of socialism), to hire somebody, then they could get the pothole fixed.
The problem for my group is that our continent has a lot of countries, many of them with no real working government. So it’s really hard to say where any of them fall. Ethiopia, for example, seems to have shed Communism in the 90’s, but still seems difficult to categorize. (So much for hiding the continent.)
I have had an epiphany. One third of my project is all but done. I have chosen Somalia as my Capitalist country. Correct me if I am wrong, but entrepreneurs (AKA “pirates”) in Somalia pay 0% in taxes and the Somali government owns 0% of the land and industry. Therefore, Somalia is one of the few perfect examples of pure Capitalism.
Aw, man. I just sent this thread straight to GD, didn’t I? That’s what happens when I drink while doing homework.
It looks like you are heading for an undeserved F then. :(.
Surely she knows that Russia has not been even nominally communist for about 20 years? It is probably more capitalistic now than the U.S.A.
Also, although your comment makes a great deal more sense than what her argument seems to have been (What? If you have ever lived under a comunist regime for part of your life you become and remain completely infantilized, for ever?), clubbing together to hire someone to fix something is hardly socialism. On that sort of criterion, having any sort of government at all would would be socialism.
No. Anarchy and brigandage such as you have in Somalia is not capitalism. Not at all. Capitalism is highly structured and it needs a rule of law (enforcement of contracts, etc.) to operate efficiently. In its most basic form, capitalism involves someone with capital (i.e., money) who is able to use this to buy equipment, supplies and facilities, and to hire workers, who then use that equipment and those supplies to make a product or provide a service that can be sold at a profit. Part of that profit is used to keep on paying the workers and buy more supplies (and perhaps to expand the facilities and hire further workers so as to be able to produce even more of the product or service) and then any left over profit (technically, perhaps, only this is profit in the strictest sense) goes to the person or people who supplied the original capital (the “owners”).
That is nothing like what pirates, brigands and warlords do. Neither is it what subsistence farmers do, and subsistence farming is probably still the predominant form of economic activity in Somalia, and indeed, most of Africa.
Maaan, you are screwed. Sorry
Getting back to the GQ aspect of this. CIA Factbook has a section for “Budget”, that it simply defines as "This entry includes revenues, expenditures, and capital expenditures. These figures are calculated on an exchange rate basis, i.e., not in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms. "
I’m assuming that this is the government’s budget. Could I compare this to the GDP to determine how socialist or capitalist a country is?
For example, Libya’s GDP is 95.88 billion. Their budget is…
revenues: $34.19 billion
expenditures: $34.73 billion (2009 est.) That’s about 36%
Angola’s GDP is $114.4 billion (2009 est.) Their budget is
revenues: $34.02 billion
expenditures: $32.47 billion (2009 est.) That’s about 29%
South Africa’s GDP is $280.6 billion (2009 est.) Their budget is
revenues: $77.68 billion
expenditures: $94.57 billion (2009 est.) about 30%
United States’ GDP is $14.26 trillion (2009 est.) Our budget is
revenues: $2.104 trillion
expenditures: $3.52 trillion (2009 est.) That’s between 15% and 24%
China is nominally communist. The economy is a mix of IIRC less than 20% state owned enterprises, the government, military and wild wild west capitalism (tainted milk anyone) with a strong dollop of mercantilism. Net that all out, and let me know what you come up with…
My God! The luny right is correct! Under Obama, we’ve turned into a communist country! At least here in New Jersey. Potholes all over the place. In New York City, they rent the bigger ones as studio apartments.
Potholes? Really? Is that the determination of a free society?
“Mussolini may have made the trains run on time, but the potholes were all over the damn place.”
You know, even thoroughgoing conservatives do not generally think that all government expenditure is socialism. Spending on the welfare of the less advantaged members of the population may be socialism, but spending on the military is not generally considered so, and the military budget can be a very large proportion of some countries’ government expenditure.
Likewise, few conservatives regard government spending on public infrastructure, such as roads to be socialism (unless, perhaps, the primary motivation is to create jobs and stimulate the economy, rather than to provide more or better roads).That is why the pothole example has absolutely nothing to do with socialism, one way or the other.
On another note, I do not know this for sure, but I suspect that the African country with by far the most avowed communists in powerful positions within the government is *South Africa*. During the Apartheid years, the South African Communist Party was strongly supportive of the ANC, and many leadership positions within the ANC were held by Communist Party members. The ANC is now the governing party, and I bet there are quite a few of those (big C) Communists still around. I haven't heard of them being purged or anything.
Of course, it does not follow that South Africa is a communist country in any meaningful sense. In fact it has the most highly developed and successful *capitalist *economy in the continent.
I think the assignment was more about the journey than the destination. I made a spreadsheet showing the per capita GDP, percentage living under the poverty level, GDP, Budget, and the ratio of the budget (expenditures) to GDP. I did this for Benin (which seems to be mostly Capitalist), Libya (which seems to be self-identified as socialist) and a few other African countries; and, for comparison, for the US, Cuba, and Sweden.
I explained the impossibility of labeling most countries as either Capitalist or Socialist, and use the chart to prove my point. She seemed to like the idea of using the budget:GDP to get an idea of the relative level of “socialism”, and was impressed with the amount of work that we did. So it all went well.
But still, nobody here has commented on the legitimacy of my idea of using a countries budget relative to its GDP to determine its level of socialism.
I would propose that Somalia is closer to Anarchy which may or may not be Capitalism (there are no public companies per se or functioning stock market). On the other hand Eritrea is Africa’s DPRK in many ways.
